Australia’s convenient story about antisemitism

Public horror in Australia dies the instant a politician says they are “deeply concerned”. Something shocking happens and the scripts misfire. People speak like people. Then the machine restarts. Opinions reappear, pressed and pre-approved. The clergy of Correct Speech file in to distribute condolences. Everyone reaches for the first sanctioned sentence so they can be recognised as the correct sort of person in the right sort of tribe. You can catch it happening in your own mind because the mind is less a courtroom than a crowded kitchen, noisy, hungry, impatient for closure.

After the Bondi Beach attack, the explanation restart was swift. Not the facts, which arrive with names attached. The explanation arrives with a handle. The handle is the idea that Islamist terror carries antisemitism the way smoke carries a smell. Understand the fire and you understand the smell. Neat. Efficient. One diagnosis, one drawer, shut and forgotten. A theory that comes with a loyalty card: buy one moral position, receive a free exemption from self-scrutiny.

This appeals for an obvious reason. It lets you be compassionate without feeling implicated. You can denounce “extremists” and keep the discomfort safely located somewhere else, in somebody else’s culture, somebody else’s religion, somebody else’s problem. Your moral posture stays immaculate. Nobody has to ask awkward questions about the society you live in, the one that can chant “diversity” in the morning and sneer at Jews by dinner, provided the sneer is packaged as “politics”.

But antisemitism is not merely fumes. It does not behave like an accidental by-product. It behaves like a tool. It travels. It adapts. It turns up in costume. Sometimes it borrows religious language. Sometimes it borrows the language of justice and liberation, which is the most grotesque disguise because it allows people to feel virtuous while doing something ancient and ugly. In fashionable circles it arrives as humanitarian concern, like a compliance officer dressed as an emergency doctor.

You have seen this even if you have never admitted it. It is the moment when Jews are not treated as people with ordinary lives, but as a concept. A symbolic plug that can be inserted into any story gone wrong. One week the symbol means money. Next week it means power. Then it means manipulation. Then it means “the elite”. Consistency is not the point. Usefulness is. Antisemitism is the one prejudice that can pose as sophistication while doing the same old work.

A familiar objection then arrives. Are you saying every criticism of Israel is antisemitic. Are you saying nobody is allowed to be furious about war. That inner defence counsel is healthy. Keep it. But watch how reliably it is exploited. The conversation is hijacked by the Amateur Barristers of Social Media, pounding the table: “So you’re saying criticism is forbidden!” Nobody said that. Yet it is a marvellous way to change the subject while posing as the self-appointed bouncer of correct feelings. Israel becomes a debating prop, a moral badge, a stage-set for Australian self-regard. The smoke model helps here. It licences people to treat antisemitism as real only when it arrives with explicit slogans, while everything else is excused as politics, passion, or “context”, that great detergent for dirty instincts.

So when an atrocity occurs and antisemitic talk spikes around it, do not assume the talk is merely trailing behind the event. Sometimes the event is a permission signal. People who already carry resentment take it as their moment to say the quiet part louder, or to dress it up in the language of morality. The violence does not invoke the prejudice from nothing. It gives it an opening, and the self-appointed interpreters of decency hurry in to explain why you should not notice.

The bleak truth is that this parasite feeds anywhere it can. It feeds in religious extremism, and it feeds in progressive spaces, and it feeds in nationalist spaces. It feeds wherever simple explanations are prized and villains are needed. Jews are not the cause of that hunger. They are the easiest shape to blame.

If you stay with this for longer than a news cycle, the public task after an attack looks different. Yes, examine the attacker’s ideology. But also examine the environment that rewards certain jokes, that treats Jewish fear as something to mock, minimise, or dismiss as a rhetorical trick. The frightening part is not that a violent person might hate Jews. The frightening part is how many non-violent people will nod along. Denial does the rest, and their story stays intact.